Vladimir Davidovich Baranov-Rossiné, 1888-1944

Eugene Baranoff (the artist's son), Paris
Alexander Budden, Columbus, Ohio
Leonard Hutton Galleries, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1974

London, The Rutland Gallery, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné 1888-1942, 1970, no. 25
New Rochelle, Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, Russian Avant-garde Art from the Schreiber Collection, September-October, 1984, no. 4
Storrs, The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, Russian Avant-garde Art from the Schreiber Collection, January-March, 1986

The Rutland Gallery, Vladimir Baranoff-Rossiné 1888-1942, London, 1970, illustrated
Jennifer Roth, Russian Avant-garde Art from the Schreiber Collection, New York, 1984, illustrated

Oil on original canvas. The surface is covered with a light layer of varnish and there are tiny spots of surface staining in places. The colours are fresh and vibrant . A minor flake of paint loss has occured in the lower left region. Under UV no repairs are visible, though the varnish prevents a conclusive analysis. Held in a modern gold painted wood frame. Unexamined out of frame.
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When Baranov-Rossiné moved to Paris at the age of 22, he was part of a wave of Russian artists already well acquainted with French avant-garde movements. Figures such as the art-publisher Nikolai Ryabushinsky and Sergei Shchukin, whose large collection of Western European art was open to the public, reinforced the strong, if complex relationship between French and Russian art in the early twentieth century. The early style of this émigré Académie Russe can be described as Neo-Impressionism with elements of Fauvism. Baranov-Rossiné's work of this period is often called Cezanne-influenced Cubism, though the present work unusually exchanges Cezanne's distinctive greens and blues, used by Baranov-Rossiné in other landscapes, for the flat exoticism and sharply delineated jungles of Henri Rousseau (fig.1), who had died the previous year.

Baranov-Rossiné's willingness to fill large canvases with colour was a constant throughout his famously varying career and is evident in this early piece. The division of colour, and the synecdoche whereby sections of leaves come to represent the trees intimate his earlier experimentation with pointillism. The amalgam of mandorla-shaped and fan-like forms allows for vibrant interplay between light and shade and the extension of these curves to the sky evokes a landscape wholly composed of foliage. Bold, sinewy verticals and the sharply defined horizontal of the mid-horizon prevents the composition from becoming indistinct or monotonous, just as lush blocks of colour contrast the delicately attenuated bare trunk in the foreground.

Given the artistic ferment in Paris in the 1910s and the excitement generated by the new directions being explored by contemporaries such as Chagall, Kandinsky and Delaunay, it is unsurprising that Baranov-Rossiné's Neo-Impressionist phase was only temporary. The charm of this early work however, is that while the artist openly acknowledges his debt to an established school, this is mediated by an instinctive delight in rhythm and curves that became a hallmark of his later experiments with Delaunay's orphisme and other styles.